I thought some people might be interested in seeing this shot I got of a spider in our garden. I used my Pentax *ist DS (of course) along with a Miranda 135mm f/2.8 manual lens, and some manual extension tubes. It took a few goes to guess the correct exposure settings but I got there in the end!

The extension tubes are great! The camera was around a foot away from the spider, but I was still able to fill up the whole of the frame (vertically at least) with the spider. That photo isn't cropped at all, it's the full 6mp original! Just reduced in size for the web, of course

Nice photos! Whenever I've seen spiders around here they're always hanging vertically on their webs, so it's impossible to get a photo of their faces!

I should probably give my sensor a clean as I'm going away on holiday next week (to Sherwood Forest no less, so maybe I'll get some photos of Robin Hood ) and I don't want my landscapes to have too many dust spots on them.

I've been avoiding shooting using slow apertures so I can't see if my sensor is dusty or not. If I don't see it, I can pretend it isn't there I suppose I should check later on today though!